The available literature on cognitive enhancing practices at times appears to lump together nootropics and “smart drugs.” Smart drugs are not officially defined, but references to this group generally include Provigil (modafinil), Adderall and Ritalin. Any confusion about the addiction potential of different brain-enhancing drugs can spread misinformation about the individual drugs. There are many nootropics on the market, so the best practice is to focus on the addiction potential of each nootropic of interest or concern.

A poster or two on Longecity claimed that iodine supplementation had changed their eye color, suggesting a connection to the yellow-reddish element bromine - bromides being displaced by their chemical cousin, iodine. I was skeptical this was a real effect since I don’t know why visible amounts of either iodine or bromine would be in the eye, and the photographs produced were less than convincing. But it’s an easy thing to test, so why not?
Microdosing involves ingesting small amounts of psychedelics to induce a very subtle physical and mental effect accompanied by a very noticeable, overall positive, health effect. When you take a microdose of a psychedelic, it is typically referred to as a sub-perceptual dose. A sub-perceptual dose will not have a major impact on your ability to function normally, but the effect will definitely be present in your mood and behavior. The microdose of a particular psychedelic is correlated to the lowest dose that will produce a noticeable effect, which is also known as the threshold dose. Since the goal is not to get a hallucinogenic effect, a microdose can be well below the psychedelics threshold dose. By integrating the correct doses of psychedelics into your weekly routine, you can achieve higher creativity levels, more energy, improved mood, increased focus, and better relational skills. There is a growing body of research that shows microdosing to improve depression, anxiety, PTSD, and emotional imbalance, help with alcohol and tobacco addiction, and decrease ADD and ADHD behaviors.
-Raw cacao is rich in theobromine, a powerful antioxidant known to support cellular aging and reduce the risk of heart disease. Its effects are similar to those of caffeine, as they both are vasodilators and improve blood flow to the brain [except cacao won’t give you jitters]...You can use raw cacao to make cacao tea, or in your smoothies. Dark chocolate with cocoa content of 80% or higher is also rich in theobromine and natural antioxidants. Besides, chocolate makes you happy. I have a small piece of high-quality dark chocolate, like 85% or 90% dark, every day.
Eliminating foggy-headedness seems to be the goal of many users of neuroenhancers. But can today's drugs actually accomplish this? I recently posed this question to Chatterjee's colleague Martha Farah, who is a psychologist at Penn and the director of its Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. She is deeply fascinated by, and mildly critical of, neuroenhancers, but basically in favour - with the important caveat that we need to know much more about how these drugs work. While Farah does not take neuroenhancers, she had just finished a paper in which she reviewed the evidence on prescription stimulants as neuroenhancers from 40 laboratory studies involving healthy subjects. Most of the studies looked at one of three types of cognition: learning, working memory, and cognitive control. A typical learning test asks subjects to memorise a list of paired words; an hour, a few days, or a week later, they are presented with the first words in the pairs and asked to come up with the second. Neuroenhancers did improve retention, especially where subjects had been asked to remember information for several days or longer.
One thing I did do was piggyback on my Noopept self-experiment: I blinded & randomized the Noopept for a real experiment, but simply made sure to vary the Magtein without worrying about blinding or randomizing it. (The powder is quite bulky.) The correlation the experiment turned in was a odds-ratio of 1.9; interesting and in the right direction (higher is better), but since the magnesium part wasn’t random or blind, not a causal result.
Alex was eager to dispel the notion that students who took Adderall were "academic automatons who are using it in order to be first in their class". In fact, he said, "it's often people" - mainly guys - "who are looking in some way to compensate for activities that are detrimental to their performance". He explained, "At Harvard, at the most basic level, they aim to do better than they would have otherwise. Everyone is aware that if you were up at 3am writing this paper it isn't going to be as good as it could have been. The fact that you were partying all weekend, or spent the last week being high, watching Lost - that's going to take a toll."
Chocolate or cocoa powder (Examine.com), contains the stimulants caffeine and the caffeine metabolite theobromine, so it’s not necessarily surprising if cocoa powder was a weak stimulant. It’s also a witch’s brew of chemicals such as polyphenols and flavonoids some of which have been fingered as helpful10, which all adds up to an unclear impact on health (once you control for eating a lot of sugar).

Eventually one morning you wake up and realize it has been years since you felt like yourself. It takes so much more effort than it did before to string thoughts together. Your clarity is gone, you can never focus for more than two seconds at a time, and penetrating insights have been replaced by a swamp of distraction, confusion, and forgetfulness. Your thoughts feel frayed, worn—like ragged fabric flapping in the breeze.

The compound has great nootropic properties that includes memory enhancement and protection against brain aging. There are studies that suggest that the compound is an effective treatment for disorders like vascular dementia, Alzheimer’s, brain stroke, anxiety and depression. However, there are some side effects associated with Alpha GPC, like headache, heartburn, dizziness, skin rashes, insomnia, and confusion.
So the chi-squared believes there is a statistically-significant difference, the two-sample test disagrees, and the binomial also disagrees. Since I regarded it as a dubious theory, can’t see a difference, and the binomial seems like the most appropriate test, I conclude that several months of 1mg iodine did not change my eye color. (As a final test, when I posted the results on the Longecity forum where people were claiming the eye color change, I swapped the labels on the photos to see if anyone would claim something along the lines when I look at the photos, I can see a difference!. I thought someone might do that, which would be a damning demonstration of their biases & wishful thinking, but no one did.)
I have no particularly compelling story for why this might be a correlation and not causation. It could be placebo, but I wasn’t expecting that. It could be selection effect (days on which I bothered to use the annoying LED set are better days) but then I’d expect the off-days to be below-average and compared to the 2 years of trendline before, there doesn’t seem like much of a fall.
One reason I like modafinil is that it enhances dopamine release, but it binds to your dopamine receptors differently than addictive substances like cocaine and amphetamines do, which may be part of the reason modafinil shares many of the benefits of other stimulants but doesn’t cause addiction or withdrawal symptoms. [3] [4] It does increase focus, problem-solving abilities, and wakefulness, but it is not in the same class of drugs as Adderall, and it is not a classical stimulant. Modafinil is off of patent, so you can get it generically, or order it from India. It’s a prescription drug, so you need to talk to a physician.
Theanine can also be combined with caffeine as both of them work in synergy to increase memory, reaction time, mental endurance, and memory. The best part about Theanine is that it free of side effects and is easily available in the form of capsules. A natural option would be to use a good green tea brand which constitutes of tea grown in the shade, because then Theanine would be abundantly present in it.

To understand further about how food intolerances can impact our mental health, it is important to explain the relationship between our gut microbiome, the immune system and our brain in a little more detail. The walls of our digestive tract provide a barrier between what we eat and the rest of our body and an unhealthy gut microbiome can lead to increased levels of inflammation, leaving the walls vulnerable to structural damage (4). Our intestinal wall is composed of cell junctions that prevent bacteria and large food molecules from entering the bloodstream, however, if these become damaged, proteins from foods that should not be circulating in our bloodstream can enter and an immune response is mounted as a reaction. This response is mediated by IgG, an antibody, that helps to protect against bacterial and viral infections as well as food antigens and is the most abundant immune cell in the body. Whilst food antigens are usually quickly cleared by an intelligent system called the reticuloendothelial system, with structural damage and a poor gut microbiome, this immune response can keep reoccurring. It is suggested that a chronic immune response such as this can have a negative impact on the brain, damaging its own structural barrier, called the Blood Brain Barrier (5).

[…] The 7 Best Brain Boosting Supplements | Live in the Now … – Act now to protect your brain with exercise, a healthy diet and brain boosting supplements! Share the knowledge! … cells and coffee and tomato sauce as my antioxidants since they are cheap out here. organic fruits and veges are also cheap out here to fruits for 3$ can take me 7days! […]

Although piracetam has a history of “relatively few side effects,” it has fallen far short of its initial promise for treating any of the illnesses associated with cognitive decline, according to Lon Schneider, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. “We don’t use it at all and never have.”

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Breathing carefully, I clutched the Costco special edition family size 1.5-liter glass bottle of vodka and carefully extracted 10 milliliters with a miniature glass pipette, which I then transferred into a small amber glass bottle. Then, with my nine-year-old son’s tiny set of school scissors, I snipped exactly 1/10 of LSD from the blotter square I’d ordered from a psychedelic research chemical supplier website the week prior, with a cloaked browser, of course, so the feds didn’t come knocking at my door. I dropped the LSD into the bottle, gave it a thirty-second shake, then placed the bottle in the pantry, next to my protein powder and creatine. I smiled. Within 24 hours, I’d be ready to sample my first homemade, volumetric “microdose” of a drug reported to increase lateral thinking patterns, improve creativity, massively boost productivity and much, much more.
Manually mixing powders is too annoying, and pre-mixed pills are expensive in bulk. So if I’m not actively experimenting with something, and not yet rich, the best thing is to make my own pills, and if I’m making my own pills, I might as well make a custom formulation using the ones I’ve found personally effective. And since making pills is tedious, I want to not have to do it again for years. 3 years seems like a good interval - 1095 days. Since one is often busy and mayn’t take that day’s pills (there are enough ingredients it has to be multiple pills), it’s safe to round it down to a nice even 1000 days. What sort of hypothetical stack could I make? What do the prices come out to be, and what might we omit in the interests of protecting our pocketbook?
Such competitive anxieties are already being felt in the workplace. Recently an advice column in Wired featured a question from a reader worried about "a rising star at the firm" who was "using unprescribed modafinil to work crazy hours. Our boss has started getting on my case for not being as productive." And on internet forums such as ImmInst (Immortality Institute), whose members share a nerdy passion for tweaking their cognitive function through drugs and supplements, people trade advice about dosages and "stacks" - improvised combinations - of neuroenhancers ("Cut a tablet into fourths and took 25mg every four hours, four times today, and had a great and productive day - with no side-effects"). In one recent post a 52-year-old - who was working full time, studying for an advanced degree at night and "married, etc" - wrote that after experimenting with modafinil he had settled on two daily doses of 100mg each. He believed that he was "performing a little better", adding: "I also feel slightly more animated when in discussion."
Some people warn of the dangers of modafinil. There are anecdotal personal accounts online of people becoming dependent on this drug. Modafinil is the generic of the brand Provigil, a nootropic. Provigil is FDA-approved to stimulate wakefulness in people suffering from sleep disorders, such as narcolepsy and sleep apnea. Initially, Provigil was thought to have a benign, non-addiction-forming profile. As such, the Drug Enforcement Administration classifies Provigil as a Schedule IV drug, a category reserved for drugs with low abuse potential; however, recent research conducted by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has found that Provigil may in fact be addictive.[10]
Avocados. Avocados are almost as good as blueberries in promoting brain health, says Pratt. "I don't think the avocado gets its due," agrees Kulze. True, the avocado is a fatty fruit, but, says Kulze, it's a monounsaturated fat, which contributes to healthy blood flow. "And healthy blood flow means a healthy brain," she says. Avocados also lower blood pressure, says Pratt, and as hypertension is a risk factor for the decline in cognitive abilities, a lower blood pressure should promote brain health. Avocados are high in calories, however, so Kulze suggests adding just 1/4 to 1/2 of an avocado to one daily meal as a side dish.
The nootropics community is surprisingly large and involved. When I wade into forums and the nootropics subreddit, I find members trading stack recipes and notifying each other of newly synthesized compounds. Some of these “psychonauts” seem like they’ve studied neuroscience; others appear to be novices dipping their toes into the world of cognitive enhancement. But all of them have the same goal: amplifying the brain’s existing capabilities without screwing anything up too badly. It’s the same impulse that grips bodybuilders—the feeling that with small chemical tweaks and some training, we can squeeze more utility out of the body parts we have. As Taylor Hatmaker of the Daily Dot recently wrote, “Together, these faceless armchair scientists seek a common truth—a clean, unharmful way to make their brains better—enforcing their own self-imposed safety parameters and painstakingly precise methods, all while publishing their knowledge for free, in plain text, to relatively crude, shared databases."
One item always of interest to me is sleep; a stimulant is no good if it damages my sleep (unless that’s what it is supposed to do, like modafinil) - anecdotes and research suggest that it does. Over the past few days, my Zeo sleep scores continued to look normal. But that was while not taking nicotine much later than 5 PM. In lieu of a different ml measurer to test my theory that my syringe is misleading me, I decide to more directly test nicotine’s effect on sleep by taking 2ml at 10:30 PM, and go to bed at 12:20; I get a decent ZQ of 94 and I fall asleep in 16 minutes, a bit below my weekly average of 19 minutes. The next day, I take 1ml directly before going to sleep at 12:20; the ZQ is 95 and time to sleep is 14 minutes.
Farah was one of several scholars who contributed to a recent article in Nature, "Towards Responsible Use of Cognitive Enhancing Drugs by the Healthy". The optimistic tone of the article suggested that some bioethicists are leaning towards endorsing neuroenhancement. "Like all new technologies, cognitive enhancement can be used well or poorly," the article declared. "We should welcome new methods of improving our brain function. In a world in which human workspans and lifespans are increasing, cognitive-enhancement tools - including the pharmacological - will be increasingly useful for improved quality of life and extended work productivity, as well as to stave off normal and pathological age-related cognitive declines. Safe and effective cognitive enhancers will benefit both the individual and society." The BMA report offered a similarly upbeat observation: "Universal access to enhancing interventions would bring up the baseline level of cognitive ability, which is generally seen to be a good thing."
It is important that this type of approach is discussed with a qualified health professional, such as a registered nutritional therapist, to ensure it is an appropriate strategy for you, as well as to help you avoid missing out on vital nutrients, whilst eliminating certain foods. They can also provide advice on improving your longer term health, which over time may allow for foods to be reintroduced without negative symptoms occurring.
Finally, it’s not clear that caffeine results in performance gains after long-term use; homeostasis/tolerance is a concern for all stimulants, but especially for caffeine. It is plausible that all caffeine consumption does for the long-term chronic user is restore performance to baseline. (Imagine someone waking up and drinking coffee, and their performance improves - well, so would the performance of a non-addict who is also slowly waking up!) See for example, James & Rogers 2005, Sigmon et al 2009, and Rogers et al 2010. A cross-section of thousands of participants in the Cambridge brain-training study found caffeine intake showed negligible effect sizes for mean and component scores (participants were not told to use caffeine, but the training was recreational & difficult, so one expects some difference).
One of the most common strategies to beat this is cycling. Users who cycle their nootropics take them for a predetermined period, (usually around five days) before taking a two-day break from using them. Once the two days are up, they resume the cycle. By taking a break, nootropic users reduce the tolerance for nootropics and lessen the risk of regression and tolerance symptoms.